Month: November 2007

I’ve made a few changes to the site recently. First of which is my new Away3D demo which is a bit of a pre-release of my shadow casting class. Secondly, I’ve changed some of the site’s functionality. I’ve moved away from prototype.js to mootools.

The shadow casting demo is of a rotating pumpkin with a cut-out face (halloween had only just passed), a light is in the centre and casts shadows on the walls. The problem is that it’s pretty (too) slow. Check out the Halloween demo page for more info.

On the progressive enhancement front, I was always a little dissappointed that I needed to use the prototype library, scriptaculous and my own code to give me what I needed. All the js files together were not particularly lightweight. I recently came across the excellent Slimbox by Christophe Beyls which gives a very pleasant lightbox effect for loading images on a page from thumbnails. After implementing it for my content, I found out that it didn’t work immediately out of the box for swf files. A quick google resulted in Mediabox by John Einselen. This works in the same way as Slimbox but works for video, flash and web content. Both of these rely on the MooTools javascript (Web 2.0 – but I’m still not convinced) framework.

I combined all three libraries and jiggled Mediabox one to allow R,G and B parameters to be specified as a background colour to the objects (rather than just black). Then I compressed the files to get the whole lot down to a more practical 28K (or there abouts). Prototype.js alone was a not so insignificant 90K(ish).

And I think it looks nice, too.

Next, there’ll be another shadow casting demo and maybe a first release of the source that should be far more performant and feature laden.